Together with his approval ranking sinking decrease and decrease, and dealing with the prospect of dropping management of the Home to Democrats, President Donald Trump is engaged in an unprecedented try to control the midterm elections.
Not solely has he demanded that Texas redraw its congressional districts, he’s now bought Legal professional Normal Pam Bondi and the Division of Justice embarking on one other insidious technique: Constructing a file of personal info on each voter that Trump can use for political benefit.
Over the previous a number of weeks, the DOJ Civil Rights Division has despatched letters to greater than a dozen states demanding they hand over their voter lists, together with delicate personal info — akin to driver’s license and Social Safety numbers linked to names, residence addresses and, in lots of circumstances, dates of start.
The DOJ is telling state election officers that it wants the information to verify their compliance with the Nationwide Voter Registration Act and the Assist America Vote Act — presumably to hunt for unlawful voting — and it reportedly intends to contact all 50 states.
However whereas federal regulation provides the Justice Division the flexibility to require states to place procedures in place to adjust to these legal guidelines and take away ineligible voters from voter rolls, it doesn’t give the federal authorities authority over election administration — and that features reviewing and sustaining the rolls themselves, mentioned David Becker, government director of the Heart for Election Innovation & Analysis.
“We’re seeing an unprecedented effort to seize power that is not granted under the Constitution, to realign the balance of power between the executive branch and the judiciary and, especially, the states,” he mentioned.
Gone fishing
There’s another excuse the DOJ might want the information.
NPR reported just lately that the administration is constructing a searchable nationwide citizenship knowledge system for use by state and native election officers to root out noncitizen voting — one thing election consultants say is an inconsequential drawback. A report launched final week from Becker’s group concluded that in states which have investigated the difficulty, incidents of noncitizen voting are minuscule and random.
By all indications, the DOJ knowledge name is an enormous fishing expedition. “They are just looking for any kind of indication of wrongdoing or error that they can point to, to further fuel the federal government’s intrusion into election administration,” mentioned Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy and partnerships on the Marketing campaign Authorized Heart, a nonpartisan group that advocates for presidency accountability.
But Michael Whatley, the Republican Nationwide Committee Chair, obliquely defended the hassle as about “election integrity” and making an attempt to make sure “safe and secure elections in key states.”
That’s obfuscation. It sounds to me — and to the election consultants I’ve talked with from each events — that this train isn’t actually about election integrity, however about laying the groundwork for a political technique for the midterm elections.
That technique may take many scary kinds, the consultants informed me. Trump may recommend that states can’t be trusted and use that to justify a state of emergency that permits him to grab management of state voting operations or droop voting in sure states. (By no means in American historical past have we suspended federal elections, Becker says — and that features throughout wars, pandemics and pure disasters.)
Or Trump may distort the voter knowledge he collects and use it to proceed to unfold false claims and conspiracy theories concerning the safety of U.S. elections. One results of these conspiracies, as we’ve realized, is that many Individuals mistrust any election the place their candidate loses.
Even simply gathering the information might scare some individuals into staying away from the polls. There are lots of individuals who may determine to not vote in the event that they assume federal entry to their private knowledge could possibly be used to intimidate them.
What’s particularly troubling is that the DOJ’s motion may undermine the decentralized elections system “that makes our elections so resilient and so resistant to things like foreign interference,” Diaz informed me. The Structure deliberately provides election administration solely to the states as a result of “the founders were very skeptical of a sort of all-powerful executive — having just thrown off the shackles of a king.”
For states to adjust to these letters, they must violate a federal regulation that prohibits the sharing of driver’s license numbers and, in lots of circumstances, additionally violate their state constitutions. In line with an inventory assembled by the Nationwide Convention of State Legislatures, many states have stricter privateness protections for his or her voter recordsdata than the federal authorities does.
One other troubling improvement is that whereas states have developed strict protocols for shielding this info, the DOJ hasn’t mentioned the way it will maintain the information secure from hackers and cybersecurity breaches. The company has an obligation to guard people, together with elected officers, judges, home violence victims and others whose private info is beneath a protecting order or exempt from public disclosure and it owes the general public an evidence for the way it’s going to deal with the information if it will get it.
Not the primary time
Trump tried to intimidate states like this in his first time period, when he created a particular fee that informed states to show over their voter recordsdata so the federal authorities may audit them. Election officers forcefully pushed again. Members later admitted the group was set as much as validate Trump’s voter fraud claims. The fee was disbanded.
This time, that resistance could also be quieter, however election officers in each pink and blue states seem like defying the DOJ request and turning over solely the components of their voter recordsdata which are already public.
In a letter to the DOJ, New Hampshire’s Republican Secretary of State David Scanlan pointed to a state regulation that claims the voter database “shall be private and confidential” and never topic to any data requests. And Utah’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson informed the Salt Lake Metropolis Tribune on Thursday that the state turned over its public voter record to federal officers, however “if they want protected data, there’s a process for government entities to request it for lawful purposes.” Then there’s Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, who mentioned this week that her state regulation doesn’t permit her to launch the information and instructed Trump’s DOJ “go jump in the Gulf of Maine.”
If Bondi has motive to pressure states to show over the voter knowledge, she ought to state the explanation and ask Congress to vary federal regulation to do it.
Till then, each American ought to be involved concerning the president making an attempt to train energy that he doesn’t have so he can invade your privateness since you determined to vote.
Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and coverage columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. ©2025 Bloomberg. Distributed by Tribune Content material Company.
